Salt Lake City Family History Conference: Family connections help create 'spirit of unity'

Family connects us: to each other, to the planet, to the ages. Family tells us who we are, how we belong.

So, of all the things to celebrate in this life, family history ranks very high on the list.

That was the message of a special program held Thursday night in the Conference Center as part of the National Genealogical Society 2010 Family History Conference being held in Salt Lake City.

"A Celebration of Family History," was organized by FamilySearch, a division of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and was a multimedia presentation featuring remarks by Henry B. Eyring, First Counselor in the First Presidency of the church; David McCullough, author, historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner; music by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; and a series of video vignettes depicting the importance of family history.

"This is a remarkable community devoted to the knitting together of hearts that cross generations," President Eyring said, as he talked of his personal experiences with the community's "spirit of unity."

He talked of the "miraculous flowering of this work," and how truly prophetic were the words of a circular printed in 1846 by a fledgling society in New England that said "the minds of men are naturally moved to know something of their progenitors."

Eyring said he had a personal witness of how young people are drawn to forge family connections when he read the journal of his grandfather that has been transcribed by his mother. "I changed the way I thought of myself when I read that he thought his life was part of a great historical pattern that reached beyond himself. I thought my life might matter and I should live it as well as I could."

That same sense of history has been important to McCullough throughout his life as he has looked deeply into the lives of others.

"I've never known much about the subjects I've written about when I started. Each book was a journey, a hunt, a detective story. That has been the joy of it, the compulsion of it," he said, noting that everyone can share in that joy.

"Curiosity is a wonderful thing. It is accelerative. The more you know, the more you want to know. It's what separates us from the cabbages."

McCullough talked of phrases that should be excised from our vocabulary, such as "self-made man" — "we are all shaped by other people," he said; "foreseeable future" — "there's no such thing. People back then had no more idea how things would turn out than we do." And, "living in the past" — no one lived in the past; they lived in their present and to understand them we have to understand their times."